Chances are you would've heard of The Addams Family, either by watching it at the Cinema or playing it at home on a computer or console. Well, if you played the 1992 Amiga version however, compared to say, the Atari ST, Mega Drive or SNES, it was one of the only versions that had no background detail at all for most of the game, just pure blackness. Well as a complete surprise to myself, it looks as if DJ Mike with the help of some EAB members are remaking the Amiga version of The Addams Family with those missing backgrounds. As one person puts it "the game is 99 % finished, I tested all the levels using infinite energy and all the backgrounds are perfect and everything is fine"
According to dlfrsilver in regards to why there were no backgrounds in the Amiga version. "The amiga version already had the backgrounds, but the parallax was deactivated or removed and the background graphics were hidden behind the main foreground." And according to squirminator2k who did further research, "it came down to wanting the smoother graphics, but also because the background layer didn't actually scroll - i.e. it was a fixed, static layer - players of an early demo build that featured the backdrops complained that it was difficult to figure out where Gomez was visually when he was in freefall. For these reasons, the backdrop layer was nix'd and we got a solid backdrop."
In regards to this enhanced version when I asked via the EAB forums for more details, DJ Mike was happy to respond with. "I am merely enhancing the original game/restoring parts that were disabled by the developers before release. I know in the first few pages 12 years ago it was discovered that the graphics and maps for the game already includes the backgrounds. It was assumed that the code for drawing them was not present in the release build, but I discovered otherwise and that's been the basis for my restoration efforts."
And that's all there is to say so far, but for now here's the latest beta to try via DJ Mike (link) and bugs or feedback to be posted through the EAB forums linked (HERE)



Just seen the beta footage provided by Saberman.. Damn it looks GOOD!
ReplyDeleteOh my! Wow! So cool! :)
ReplyDeleteApparently required WHDload v20... which is not out.
ReplyDeleteSaberman has got it working fine, so best to ask him what he used :)
DeleteI asked .. " The beta version of Whdload 20 is available here: https://www.whdload.de/whdload/whd200.lha
Deletewww.whdload.de
Zbigniew
You need to extract the files from the archive to the existing Whdload installation. "